Throughout the semester, we’re shining a light on the Art Department’s graduating MFA candidates as they present their final thesis exhibitions. These exhibitions are the culmination of years of dedicated study and artistic exploration, showcasing our students’ diverse talents and innovative approaches to art-making.
Nika McKagen works in traditional darkroom photography, sculpture, and writing. She is particularly interested in “what goes on both underground and in the dark.”
“My work is largely based in field research in caves and mines across the planet, and addresses the literal thresholds between the aboveground and subterranean realms,” McKagen explains. “The works that I create often live outside of the traditional photograph. They want to become objects in the world.”
McKagen’s final thesis exhibition, “Conduit,” will be on view at UW–Madison’s Art Lofts Gallery (111 N. Frances St.) from Feb. 24–28. A reception, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Friday, Feb. 7, from 5 to 8 p.m.
We asked Stowe to share insights into her exhibition. Below she talks about her work, “Untitled (gate).”
How did you create this work?
I took this picture while underground in inland Ireland last summer. It’s a medium format film photograph.
Back home in the darkroom, I blew up the photograph and made about 50 silver gelatin prints of the pieces of the photo, which I then collaged together, mounted to wood, and covered with encaustic (a beeswax + resin combo that some painters use). Many of the pieces in the show are treated similarly with this collaging + encaustic process; working with images of voids feels so tricky sometimes, like they’re almost too challenging to confront head on — so there’s something about covering them with an opaque layer of stuff that allows them to be approached more readily.
What inspired you to create it?
The work in this show examines sites that link the aboveground and subterranean worlds, and wants to find out what the conduit connecting the two worlds might be. When I’m underground sometimes I stumble across things that seem like complete mysteries to me, like this gate. There are so many of these quasi-perverse artifacts of human intervention in these spaces that are emblematic of our colonization into the underground realm.
These objects feel like the contemporary equivalents of ancient cave paintings to me. I want to figure out what happens both environmentally and psychically at these sites after we excavate into them and mine them for resources. Also, I’m starting to believe that most everything we do has to do with the void, and especially with the way that we choose to approach it.
What do you hope viewers take away from your exhibition?
We don’t think about the underground often, but we should. We take all kinds of things from it and use it to build our material world up here. I hope that the works in this show can act as a little token of the ever-present and always-complicated underground realm.